


The Nightmare Men

by JoAsakura



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Halloween, M/M, Post canon, creepy musings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-22 11:20:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8284037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: Far in the future, Winston is forced to call in a favour he never, ever wanted to.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a musing on Jack's Immortal skin for the OW 2016 Halloween event

WATCHPOINT GIBRALTAR, TOO MANY YEARS LATER

It's quiet except for the crash of the ocean and the distant, sputtering hum of the Watchpoint's power grid. So quiet, each of Winston's halting footsteps down the long, dark corridor sound like gunshots.

_Tak-BAM_

_Tak-BAM_

The hallway is lined with the statues of the fallen. Friends, family. Symmetra had danced them into life, had left him a module with her own for the inevitable day. (She stands closest to the door, so she can see the sun. Could see the sun. If it ever returns. )

A flash of blue in the darkness as he limps past D.Va, smiling at fans long gone and he braces for the scream.

(Tracer's statue is not among the fallen, because Lena isn't dead. She's not alive either, trapped by her failing harness in a scattered, shattered pocket of time. She started screaming a year ago and Winston is too old now, too slow, to try and decipher what or when she's trying to warn him of.)

Her scream sounds like a record wailing backwards, and his thick grey coat stands on end as he tries to punch in the door code with trembling fingers. He's certain no gorilla should have lived as long as he has. No one at all should have to carry the torch he has for so long.

(My fault. I called them all back I brought them all back) He thought, as the door hissed open, belching stale air into the corridor. A wary step in, then another, and the lights come on one at a time with a loud clunk.

"Athena." Winston grunts, finding his voice. He's been alone for so long, he shut the AI down on the upper levels years ago, leaving him with his thoughts and Tracer's wailing in the dark.

Silence, then "Athena here, Winston." Her audio processors crackle as screens sputter to life around him.

"Recall code: ouija." He says, knotting his hands fretfully. Outside the skies are thick with green-tinged clouds and people are dying. The invaders began dropping from the sky less than twenty four hours ago, and the world is burning. There is no Overwatch, no time to find new warriors for the fray.

And the Nightmare Men promised him one favour for "old time's sake". One single favour when they left, when he begged them to stay away. There were new recruits for a while after that, who told stories of the monsters who stalked the shadows of the world, who waded onto the battlefield like ancient gods on no side but their own.

(Be good) some mothers whispered to their children nowadays. (Be good or the nightmare men will take you)

"Winston, are you sure?" Athena asks, and he wonders how a collection of monitors can feel so accusatory.

"Do it." He growls, and he sees her compliance flash blue across the bank of screens.

It feels like a thousand years, but it's only minutes before the temperature changes in the room, the pressure of it. It feels like he's dying in space, freezing and boiling all at once as black fog blankets the floor.

"I owe Jack twenty bucks." The Reaper says with a voice that makes Winston's guts twist themselves inside out. He wears white now. Pristine, spotless, except for the red that permanently marks his silvery claws. The open sleeves give a glimpse of what lies beneath. Flesh long since turned to churning threads of inky nanomatter, constantly twisting beneath the suit. Gabriel Reyes hasn't taken off the mask in thirty years, maybe more. Perhaps afraid that if he does, he'll lose cohesion once and for all. "I thought you'd die before you called us in from the cold."

Winston turns slowly, and he smells The Hollow before he sees him, but it's an absence of scent really, in the abyssal, burning metal aroma the Reaper infects every space with. An absence of breath, of pulse. Even his footsteps are silent as he takes his place beside the Reaper.

At some point the same serum that had made Gabriel's fusion with Mercy's nanotechnology a living, constant biosynthetic hell had finally caught up with Jack Morrison. Winston had seen him die, again and again, and rise like a Phoenix each time until Talon had torn him apart.

And he had died, but he had not. And beneath the layers of Kevlar and leather, there was no heart to beat, no lungs to rise and fall.

His suit is red now, plain and glossy as blood. Touches of white and black to echo the black and red on Reaper's. His eyes, sunken in, black caves where points of red burning in skin that had gone as white as Reaper's coat. Not the skin of a dead man, it reminded him, insanely, of bones and wood left long in the ground, turning to opal and stone. It was the skin of something that had not been human in a very long time.

The Hollow looks at him, Jack Morrison's elegant cheekbones carved out of long-buried ice and eyes flickering like flame and Winston feels a wet, hot dribble run down his leg. Silence, except for the hammering in his ears and the smell of piss barely noticeable against the stink of the void.

"Jack says you need to take a deep breath, Winston. Relax." Reaper says in that horrible calm voice, sliding up next to him. Black smoke coils around The Hollow's leg, possessive, and for a moment, he brushes his cheek against the Reaper's gleaming mask, a smile pulling at marble lips. "After all, we're here to help save the world one. Last. Time."


	2. Bonus chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Winston shouldn't peek.

Winston had given them a room while he put together the schematics of the alien vessel, and as he approached it, the datapad shook violently in his hands. Lena had stopped screaming since their arrival, and he was at least a little grateful for that.

He peered in the doorway, the smell of burning metal seeping through the gap, and he froze, trying to still the shivering plastic in his hands.

In the dim room, The Hollow stood, red jacket in his hand, black shirt hiked up, and Winston felt a twist of bile in his throat. The Reaper's black tendrils curled around him, up his leg, slipping through the gaps in The Hollow's flesh and bones, coiling like roots and blooming black blossoms through the space where his heart had once been.

The Reaper paced around him, the pure white of his coat stark in the gloom, against the roiling black fog that swirled against the floor, and drew those red-stained claws against The Hollow's face. His black-caverned burning eyes were closed and he leaned into the touch, lips parting to exhale a shadowy breath.

With his other hand, The Reaper cautiously removed his mask, twisting threads of darkness shuddering in the imitation of a face. The strands would part, red eyes flickering in the depths, the flash of glittering teeth as too many mouths smiled. The Hollow leaned in further, hard opal against liquid shadow. The leather of his suit didn't even creak as he arched, those dark roots twisting further inside of him.

Winston dropped the datapad as The Hollow shivered, mouth tracing the edges of one of The Reaper's and the two figures froze.

"It's not nice to spy, Winston." The Reaper purred, roots withdrawing from The Hollow's torso as the figure in red tugged his shirt down. Reaper put the mask back on and it settled on his face, pulled into place by tiny threads. "And Jack's right. You've been alone too long, you've forgotten how to interact with normal people."

Those red eyes fixed Winston as the elderly gorilla picked up the datapad. "I have what data I could to get you on board that ship." He said, clutching it to his chest.

The Hollow took the pad from him without a single sound. "Jack wants to know what you think our chances are." The Reaper said. "This isn't much to go on."

"How.." Winston stammered out. "I mean.." He knotted his hands fretfully again and again. "Twenty percent. Twenty five, maybe."

The Hollow handed the datapad to the Reaper and leaned close in. Close enough that Winston could smell the absolute nothing of him. Winston tried not to back away, to not flinch, to not piss himself again under that red gaze. Very slowly, The Hollow pressed a finger on each side of Winston's mouth and pushed upwards.

"Jack says you should smile, just a little. After all, we're all soldiers now." The Reaper tugged his hood down a little closer and Winston thought he saw a glint of teeth beneath the mask.


	3. Event Horizon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Athena sees.

There is a sound, a low hum, so low, so deep, If he were still alive, Athena would have guessed Winston would have felt it in his teeth more than actually heard it. They say black holes make a sound, the lowest note in creation as they sing into the void. This is more than that. And less. (Winston wouldn't have followed it, he knew better. But from the monitors, Athena watches with a distant, clinical fascination.)

Against the bone-bleeding hum, there's a high pitched counterpoint, a clear ring, a wet finger on a the rim of a crystal glass, and there are people fifty miles away who feel their skin shiver and the hair stand on their necks.

In the dark, on one of Gibraltar's crumbling rooftops, the sound mingles with the crash of the waves, while the stars spread out overhead.

"We are all made of star stuff." If there's a quote that drives the Reaper insane, it's that. He knows. From the moment the nanocytes in his body began to evolve, to change from simple cellular machines to dark-matter-quantum-computers, weaving themselves out of the slivers of cosmic radiation slipping through the atmosphere. The white suit that contains what used to be Gabriel Reyes lays puddled on the cement along with the red of his companion , infinitely-growing black threads slipping and churning. A glowing red eye here, or a sly mouth there parts between the strands as he strokes the Hollow's chin, gently coaxing hard opal lips apart.

Against the absolute shuddering darkness of the Reaper's strands, the Hollow seems almost luminous, translucent in some spots and Athena notes the black tendrils moving inside of him, ancient beasts slipping like shadows under a sheet of ice, before surfacing through the gaping holes in Jack Morrison's throat and torso. Black vines coil around his long legs and bloom against the fissured surface of his face.

A hand, opal and stone, looking too hard for the delicate curve his fingers take, cradles the back of where a head would be on a human, slipping amongst the black strands as he opens his mouth further, urging further invasion.

On a mathematical level, Athena understands that the Hollow's existence is akin to imaginary, a singularity contained in an event horizon the shape of a man, while the Reaper is growth unchecked, infinite possibility bleeding out with the scent of burning metal and a laugh like the groaning music of a deep space electromagnetic storm.

Stars scream when a black hole tears them apart, she's heard it, listening to massive radio telescopes. But this high ringing sound, the sound of Reaper's mass sliding against the shell of the Hollow, is more of a song of relief.

She thinks she understands, watching the Hollow tip his head back, dark shapes darting beneath the glassy surface of his throat, black threads webbing across his skin. The cosmic cycle of death and rebirth - stars spinning out of the first fires to flare and burn out cold and lost- play out on a fractal scale within the Reaper's impossible mass, spreading like an infection in his wake. She knows the pain of Gabriel's initial decay and regeneration cycles was immense, but this is unimaginable, even to her level of processing.

For the Hollow, becoming unmoored from those same processes, to become a fixed point in space and time where every sound and sensation approaches but never reaches, it can only be the opposite, she imagines.

But for these moments, as Reaper stitches shut the hole in space in the shape of Jack Morrison, and the Hollow gives Gabriel a brief respite from the constant, surging change, they both seem transcendent. It defies every statistical modeling program she has to try and predict how much further either one will evolve.

In the camera's view, the Hollow arches, one hand still caught in the squirming mass of dark matter, lifting on his toes with an expression of bliss on his broken face.

Somewhere in Gibraltar's halls she hears another sound, one long trill. Winston thought Tracer was screaming, trapped in the beats between moments, but Athena has different thoughts. Fractions of syllables like flakes of glass as Lena moves in and out of existence.

It might be another thousand years, but eventually, she'll complete the word.

An alert flares in her command tree, and Athena flicks her attention back to the Nightmare Men- Winston's old name for them, not hers- the security cameras all show flickering red eyes, and she can feel the encroaching infection of the Reaper creeping through her circuits as she throws up firewalls and protections in the wake of her retreat. There are impossible equations, physical input data that defies every bit of science she knows and for the first time in her long existence, the child of a God AI knows something akin to fear.

"Athena." The Reaper's white-noise laugh hisses in her speakers. "Jack says it's not nice to peep. Don't do it again."

From corridors,Tracer falls silent, and in her secure mainframe bunker, Athena powers down rather than hear that laugh again.


	4. Scar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A prompt for Kinktober 2017 :)

The Hollow paced in the long scrape of the Rima Ariadaeus, staring up at the blue orb of earth.

There was no sound as he scuffed a foot along the lunar dust. His skin caught the reflected glow, iridescent light shifting under his skin. No sound, no sensation. His red and black garments lay discarded and he dug his unfeeling feet into the silvery ground.

Time hadn’t had meaning to him since the last time Jack Morrison had felt the warmth of the sun on his skin or heard sounds that weren’t the impossible groaning of dying stars.  
There was a sudden shuddering of the void, and burning red eyes closed against the rainbow of solar winds rolling across the airless sky.

As the Reaper’s black tendrils curled up his bare legs, the Hollow *felt*. It was abyssal cold, the burning core of a young sun, silken pleasure and a billion prickling knives. It blossomed in his empty chest, in his throat, moving underneath his glassy skin, behemoths moving under ancient ice.

They blossomed in his throat and he made a sound, rippling the ancient scar.

“They say the moon will split again on judgement day, Jackie.” The Reaper materialised around him, and the Hollow arched back, running one opalised hand through the churning mass of black matter threads. He dug his fingers deep into the mess and Reaper made his own little gasp. “You’re saucy today.”

“….”

“Do you want that? Do you want me to split the moon for you, baby? Even though all you have to do is open that pretty mouth.”

Red eyes slid over to Reaper’s twining face and he smiled, licking at the black petals that tasted like blood and roses and electricity, that smelled like rain and ultraviolet rays. He dragged Reaper closer, opening his mouth to let the black mass fill him.

  
“…”

“I love you too, baby.” The soundless words vibrated through the Hollow’s shell, leaving gleaming, effervescent trails in their wake.

Beneath their feet, the moon trembled, dust drifting into the dead atmosphere.


End file.
